Opening

Passing from one world into a larger more spacious, complex, and liberating one is a human capacity. It isn’t well-known, but if you think about it, you and everybody you know, has passed from baby to adult. Along the way, there were many stages, many trips beyond oneself to a larger world. All it took was Nature’s pushing, growing us into the occupant of a larger way of being. The capacity to open up, and become something more, is built into our DNA, it is the way of Nature.

Like the crab we learn to abandon our shells to grow, to become, to occupy the world. Unlike the crab our carapace is located more within us, rather than outside, and because humans are a complex organism, molting (becoming larger) is a more complicated maneuver. At certain stages, the shifts that engender awareness, require humans to suffer growth pains, in the form of confusion, anxiety, depression, and vulnerability. These feelings arise around the impending urgency of growth, that wells up from within —no matter what — they occur from growing, or not growing.

It is for this reason — the growth pressure within — that there is a lot of normal suffering. It is also for this reason that we humans need to know about opening. A big part of this knowing is hard to stomach, disillusioning even — although a sure sign of maturation. Growing is painful, and involves periods of vulnerability. Leaning into anxiety and fear, feelings that impending change invariably produce, is counterintuitive, even as it validates what a complex animal we are. Opening is hard, but essential, for any kind of resilient being to stride deeper into the world.

It is easy to get mesmerized, hypnotized by the political and environmental conditions that threaten the worst kind of changes. These kinds of circumstances, charge the experience of change, with all kinds of feelings and ideological baggage. Change appears to be so hopeful to some, and so threatening to others. As a result cultural change has grown constipated. It needs a period of openness.

This is where Nature comes in. It open us. Despite ourselves, we humans give birth— to ourselves, to each other, to greater capacity, even to a world complex enough to include our diverse aspirations. The thing is, for this birth to happen, for the quickening that presages it to stir, a period of openness must occur. This means more vulnerability, uncertainty and unknowing than most of us are used to. Inviting a new sensibility, a world capable of holding so much diversity, means surrendering our knowing, putting aside our best laid plans, and our hoped for visions. Openness is exacting.

Nature has delivered to us the experience of opening. It is more awkward and vulnerable than most of us like. It can be as brutal as birth. It can also be a blessed entryway — a portal — a new way of seeing ourselves, each other, and the world we share. Strangely, Nature has anticipated times this stuck. It has provided us with the capabilities we need. Opening is not as hard as not opening. 

Existential threats are known to create communal opening, as do some forms of hallucinogens, ageing can do it too, but the opening needed now is more pervasive than all of that — it is the opening of the human heart. The moment contains existential threat enough — psychedelic wonder sufficient to the task. What remains is for each of us to open ourselves. I know this is easier said than done, but let me remind us all — this is how Life proceeds.

 Luckily, Life has aged me into paradoxical awareness — so I can sense the opening in what’s closing around us.

Deciding

Are you in a prison 

or

 are you in a playhouse

or

both?

The process of shaping one’s life never seems to stop. Change goes on, with or without us. We get to have some input into this inexorable dance, but it isn’t large and definitive. Mostly, it’s after the fact, lame, and fairly poorly thought out. Still, no factor plays as large a role in how we shape ourselves as the choices we make. Deciding exercises the autonomy that is us — it shapes how we live, and who we are. It is so important, and so rarely examined. I wonder why? Perhaps, this writing meditation will shed some light on this soul-bending phenomenon.

I think my life is mostly a lucky accident. I’ve been given a lot of credit for what I became during an unbelievable ordeal. The truth of it is, not much courage was required. I could read the writing on the wall, dead or alive — I belonged to Life — about that I had no choice. I still don’t. Life chose for me, I survived briefly. I’m in that interlude now. I get to decide how I play this second chance, and that means that I am once again thrust up against my own attitudes about this existence.

I dwell in crazy possibility. I am, afterall, a radical unlikelyhood. So, for me, this phase of this life, is a free pass. Brain damage and luck have forged a strange passport that gives me free reign, a kind of diplomatic immunity, to be weird, eccentric, and slightly off, without the usual consequences. You see, it’s hard to take what’s left very seriously.

But, I remember the time before my stroke of luck. I was such an upright human, so desperate to learn, to live right, to be one of the reliable ones. My decisions, about myself, and my way of being with others, dripped with  eagerness. I was a mensch wannabee. My decisions followed accordingly. I lived well, in my well-appointed jail cell, locked into my desire for other’s to like and approve of me, and what I’d become.

This is a meditation on choice, and I am struck by the paradox, that I call myself “Lucky” because I had no choice. Life took away all my options, and gave me something I could never have cooked-up. The passport Life gave me at the border is something I never deserved, something I never even imagined. Still, it is carrying me through the provinces I thought I knew, and it is introducing me to the possibilities that I couldn’t see. Being human has become a kind of high bafflement, that defies what I was taught, and asks me to go further.

The truth is I can’t decide. Is being here a gift from some source beyond, or a curse? — a lively mystery tour, or an unfolding nightmare designed to unnerve. It seems schizo-enough to be all of the above. So, here I am, unable to decide, and without a choice about having to decide. So, I’m looking for Life to keep carrying me along despite my decisions. And, I’m getting Life carrying me along, in the way it is, because of my decisions. How’s that for justice? I decide despite myself, and I get to live with the consequences.

I know I’m no clearer about deciding, than I was when I began this inquiry. Deciding seems to have some kind of ephemeral veil — what looks easy and necessary, turns out mysterious and undecipherable. Life seems to hang on my attitudes and beliefs, and then some hitchhiking wonder takes over the wheel.

There’s nothing illuminating in what I’ve written, and maybe that is the greatest asset that this treatise holds.